Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet, philosopher, and literary critic whose writings have been enormously influential in the development of modern thought. In his own lifetime, Coleridge was renowned throughout Britain and Europe as one of the Lake Poets, a close-knit group of writers including William Wordsworth and Robert Southey, who resided in the English Lake District. Coleridge was also known to many English readers as a talented prose writer, especially as the author of the Biographia Literaria (1817), a literary autobiography; The Friend (1809-1810), a collection of essays; and Aids to Reflection (1825), a series of aphorisms on religious faith. Residents of Bristol might have remembered him as a young radical firebrand who delivered some controversial lectures on politics and religion in 1795, while residents of London would more likely have recalled his lectures on literature (delivered from 1808 to 1819), which first established his public image as a distinguished man of...